After nearly five decades spent behind the camera (and countless interviews), the 87-year-old documentarian Frederick Wiseman has grown used to critics missing the mark when they attempt to define his subtle, signature style. When asked about a label he loathes, “observational cinema,” Wiseman rolls his eyes: “These academic categories are, basically, from my point of view, worthless. Another one that’s even more derogatory than observational is ‘fly on the wall.’ As far as I know, flies are not conscious.”

“I’m not saying that I’m that conscious,” Wiseman continues, “but I’m more conscious than a fly. And these movies are constantly involving choices: what to shoot, how to shoot it, how long to shoot it, whether to shoot it, when to stop, who to shoot. And then: do you use it? How do you cut it? How do you compress it? Blah, blah, blah. It’s endless.”

In Ex Libris, Wiseman’s latest film, which premieres Wednesday at Film Forum in New York, Wiseman returns to his element—that is, asking himself an extensive series of questions, and making just as many considered decisions, in order to create a rich portrait of a place and the people who inhabit it.

Over the course of roughly three hours, he illustrates the vital role that the New York Public Library and its 92 offshoot branches play in civic and cultural life. Beyond the complex bureaucratic web of board members, staff, and trustees responsible for sustaining the library, one of the most striking elements at work in Ex Libris—and across Wiseman’s long career—is his ability to take notice of idiosyncratic moments and record them for posterity.

In one of the film’s most poignant scenes, shot at the city’s smallest branch—the 685-square-foot Macomb’s Bridge Library, located inside the New York City Housing Authority’s Harlem River Houses—a group of locals sit together discussing the library’s critical contributions to their community. One man explains, “I couldn’t afford to go to film school. I learned from the library—I learned how to type, how to read a script. I was taking care of my kids; I couldn’t afford it. I couldn’t find a job. So I learned from the library.”

In these few seconds, it becomes clear just how meaningful, and personal, so many New Yorkers’ relationships to the library and its resources are. As another scene reveals, the library offers far more than just books to be loaned out and returned. Consider how grateful the caller on the other end of the phone must have been upon receiving this illuminating response from one of the live librarians working the Ask N.Y.P.L. hotline: “A unicorn is actually an imaginary animal. It’s not a creature that ever existed. The first appearance that I have of it is in the year 1225. . . . I’ll have to translate this from Middle English.”

At the end of August, Wiseman sat down with Vanity Fair at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on Fifth Avenue to discuss the making of Ex Libris, capturing humanity on camera—whether in ballet studios, public parks, high schools, or a hospital for the criminally insane—and the generalizations that drive him nuts to this day.

Vanity Fair: How would you describe your personal relationship to the N.Y.P.L. over the course of your career?

Frederick Wiseman: I really didn’t have a personal relationship, because I didn’t live in New York.

You’re based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, right?

Right. I had been in the library, and I did a little research once in the Library for the Performing Arts, but I really didn’t know much about the library.

Was that part of the draw to delve into it?

One of the things I perhaps have said endlessly, but I’ll say it again because it [happens to be] true, is that the shooting of the movie is the research. I learned about the library by hanging out here for 12 weeks. And I don’t like to hang out and not be prepared to shoot, because there might be something interesting going on and it’s unrepeatable, because I don’t stage anything. Once I’m here, I like to be able to get it.

It’s interesting that you use the word “unrepeatable.” These moments that you’re capturing on screen—that’s it, it’s whatever you get in the moment.

Like in In Jackson Heights—the religious ladies that came up from the South to clean up the streets of Jackson Heights. That woman came over and asked them to pray for her dying father. It’s just sheer luck. Sheer luck! I mean I heard these Southern women speaking; I heard the Southern accent and wondered what they were doing; I saw them sweeping the streets. I started to shoot, and then this other woman came up and said, “Will you pray for my father?” You know you’ve led a clean and moral life when you’ve got a sequence like that!

Do you have a sense when you’re capturing such moments that they’re going to serve as the emotional heart of the film? Does that come to you in the editing or do you know when they’re happening?

Well, it varies. In a sequence like the one I’ve just described, you know if there’s an image and the sound comes out, you’re going to use it. Or the taxi driver sequence in In Jackson Heights, or the sequence with Elvis Costello or Patti Smith in [Ex Libris]—I knew I was going to use them. I didn’t know what part I was going to use. But often, it’s equally true that sometimes you think a sequence is very good. But then in the cold light of dawn, in the editing room, the emotion that you felt at the time of shooting is gone—and you look at it more coldly, and it’s not so good. And the reverse is also true. Something you thought was, “Yeah . . . I don’t know,” may serve a very useful purpose in terms of the structure of the film or providing information. It can go both ways.

So you didn’t have a personal relationship to this particular library, but I’d like to broaden the question and ask, are libraries a part of the research process for you?

Not as an adult. As a child and as an adolescent and as a college student, libraries were very important to me. But since I’ve reached my alleged adulthood, they’re less important. I have a tendency to buy books I want to read.

[Growing up], I used the library a lot. But that was at a time when the library had a more passive role, in the sense that you went to take out a book, or maybe sit there for a while, or maybe go do some research. But I was absolutely amazed to discover the variety and the depth and the extent of programs that the [New York Public Library] offered during the process of making the film.

A still from Wiseman's Ex-Libris - The New York Public Library.

Courtesy of TIFF.

Did you know from the beginning of the process that you wanted to make the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building the centerpiece of the film? How did you account for the numerous branch libraries, which play such a critical role for so many communities within the city?

Well, I knew the Schwarzman Building was important because it was the center of the administration. And I wanted to shoot the meetings and all the principle administers and offices down the hall. I also knew that I wanted to go to the branches. I didn’t know the extent that I was going to go to the branches. There’s something like 90 branches, spread across three boroughs: Manhattan, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But I was concerned that if I jumped around too much . . . I mean, I’ve never jumped around so much in any film.

As the movie ended up, I think there were 13 different locations. But from my point of view at least, what goes on in those different locations are thematically connected, because you see the diversity of programs and activities that the library offers.

Something that kept coming up for me was the socioeconomic and generational diversity of people for whom the library holds significance—in the cuts between scenes, you see this gap between who the library is publicly serving and those charged with financially sustaining it. Did you intend to structure the film to show the different motivations and investments that people have all centered on this one place?

Well, it’s a movie about New York.

That sums it up! But it’s true.

Because all classes and many races and ethnicities are represented in the film in different ways. I mean, I didn’t necessarily set out to do it that way. I’ve never yet made a movie where I knew in advance what the themes of the movie were going to be.

Did you ever think that you knew?

Not really. With a few exceptions, I really have never known much about the place in advance. In one sense, the final film is what I’ve learned. But in terms of the ideas of it all and the point of view of the film, that is the result of process, which includes being at the place for whatever period of time I’m there—which, in the case of the library, was 12 weeks—and studying the material. In the case of [Ex Libris,] I had 150 hours, and the film is a little more than three hours, so I used about 1/50th of the material.

What do you do with the rest of the material? Does it go into some sort of vault? What about all the deleted scenes?

Well, it used to be in the basement of my house. But the negative was always in the lab. At one point I had 8 million feet of outs—both sound and video—in the basement. But a number of years ago, I put it on deposit at the Library of Congress, because the storage conditions there are better, and I had to move out of the house.

Scott Sherman’s 2015 book, Patience and Fortitude, chronicles the controversy surrounding the abandoned Central Library Plan and the N.Y.P.L.’s grim financial situation. Sherman encountered some pushback from staff members who were not necessarily transparent with him. Do you feel that the staff you encountered while filming were transparent with you?

Yes. When I asked [N.Y.P.L. President and C.E.O.] Tony Marx for permission to make the film, I said, “I understand there may be some things I can’t shoot because I don’t have a God-given right, but generally speaking, I want access to everything. But I understand that some things are, by necessity, ‘secret.’” I have one or two things that I wouldn’t want people to know about me. So he accepted that. And I was able to move around pretty freely. Certainly there were some trustee meetings that I wasn’t able to go to, but I mean, they have the right.

Would the staff know in advance that you were shooting?

Sometimes . . . I had to ask somebody when the staff meeting was. But I don’t remember being turned down any time I requested to go. Some of the staff meetings took place on the same day, every hour. So I’d just show up.

I didn’t start with a thesis. I wanted to learn something about the library. In one sense, what I learned about the library is what you see in the film. And if I could say it in 25 words or less, I shouldn’t have made the movie. Scott Sherman started out with a thesis about the library, and that’s not my cup of tea.

What do you think documentaries in particular offer audiences that other media do not?

A documentary in the style that I use, if it works, can bring the place to the person—they can feel that they are participant. They can feel that they’re at a staff meeting or at a presentation in the Bronx library. My job as a filmmaker, but particularly as an editor, is to provide the viewer with enough information so they can understand what’s going on and feel that they were an observer at the meeting. Even though what I show is highly selective. Part of my job as an editor is to create the illusion that the event that the audience is watching took place the way they’re seeing it in the film, even though it didn’t.

In some cases, a documentarian does insert him or herself into their film. Someone like Michael Moore—people have a sense of who he is. Do you feel your films can reach a wider audience because you’re not quite as “present” in them?

The thing is, I am present, but I’m present in a different way. The film represents the choices that I have made. It’s not like the way a professor marks exams, where you throw the papers up the stairs and the top of the stairs gets an A. Physical presence is just one of many forms of presence. And my films all have a point of view, but the point of view is expressed indirectly through structure.

People may not agree with me, but in my movies, the approach is more novelistic than journalistic. And my technique is one that’s similar to writing and similar to a novel. It’s just the way I approach it. Because it’s more indirect: I’m asking you, the viewer, to think about what it is you’re seeing and my choice of sequences and the order in which I present them. [That’s] the way I present my point of view. Rather than saying I’m for climate change—it’s here, and we’ve gotta do something about it. [That] is another technique, which I’m not minimizing, but it’s just not mine.

How do you facilitate an environment for your subjects to act candidly, as though a camera and two people are not stationed a few feet away?

I’m not sure that I know why anybody agrees to be photographed. But the fact of the matter is, people agree. It’s very rare that anybody says no, and it’s very rare that they act for the camera.

I’ll go into it briefly. It’s a complicated question. First of all, I don’t think people are good enough actors to change their behavior, and if they try to change their behavior, it’s readily apparent. And if people were good enough actors to change their behavior, the pool of actors for Broadway and Hollywood would be much greater than it is. Thirdly, anybody in any profession, whether it’s your profession as a writer or my profession as a filmmaker—you have to have a good bullshit meter in order to survive, because otherwise you’re susceptible to being conned. And most people, at least in the films that I’ve made, they like the idea that someone’s sufficiently interested in them to want to record their activities.

So through some combination of one or more of those explanations . . . it’s very rare that anybody plays with the camera. It’s very rare anybody says no.

Has the “observational cinema” label been applied by critics since your debut with Titicut Follies in 1967?

Oh, from the beginning. It’s a joke. People who use that sometimes, I think, don’t understand the technique. They may understand it, but they still fall back on these clichéd phrases. I mean, I don’t know why the word “movie” isn’t a good enough description. They’re movies! I make movies. Documentary, at least from my generation, has always had something pejorative about it. You watch a documentary, and it’s like your mother prescribing Ex-Lax. It’s good for you.

I mean, when you ask someone on a date to the movies, and you ask them if they want to see a documentary . . .

Right! On the part of many people, there’s no recognition that a documentary can be funny, can be dramatic, can be absorbing. It doesn’t necessarily have to educate you to the perils of hamburger or the dangers of climate change. Not that those aren’t good subjects—but they’re not sufficient.

Film Forum will present Part II of its Frederick Wiseman retrospective, covering the years 1986-1996, on Thursday, September 14. Part III of The Complete Wiseman, covering the filmmaker’s work from 1997 to the present, will run this winter.